Growing up in the valley
This piece has been on my mind for a while now, I started writing it over the of winter of 2020, and it’s only grown more relevant, both to the world at large and to my research practice. I’ve mentioned before that it feels like I’m climbing out of a valley and seeing a new horizon open up in font of me. This isn’t just a metaphor. I grew up in an actual valley in Northern California, a place where rivers collide. Sacramento: the center of the Sacramento Valley. But inside that valley was another valley. An ideological valley, intertwined with the physical valley in ways I’m still trying to understand.
I’m writing this to put some shape to a decade and a half process of unpacking beliefs I was raised with. I’m sharing this because the ideas I was raise with are fundamental to some of the more dramatic developments of the last few years. This also is an ongoing exploration for me, and likely always will be. As always: point me to things I should be reading, people I should talk to, or rocks I should maybe look under.
My middle-of-the-valley youth looked like Boy Scouts, home school, evangelical church on Sunday, camping trips, shooting guns in the mountains from time to time, cookouts all year long, oil changes in the driveway, Wednesday morning Latin club, Wednesday night bible study/fellowship dinner, reading the “classics,” learning the trivium, baseball games. We’d go see my dad’s family in Santa Rosa, my mom’s family in Roseville. Sometimes we trekked out to Portuguese Beach. Once or twice we vacationed in a house on Bodega Bay. Mostly we spent time at the local pool.
I grew up during the 90s and 00s, inside a bubble of a worldview that I’m still trying to unpack, but that’s directly connected to the ideological valley I was raised in. The bubble might be best described as “impotently reactionary,” the product of two Gen Xers who came up among some of the worst tendencies of the boomer era and who broke with their moderate-by-comparison families to turn towards radical fundamentalism.
I’m not entirely sure what “conservative” meant for my parents. We weren’t as politically active as the people around us. By some miracle I can proudly say I was never out at the state capitol marching against human rights or protesting at abortion clinics. I suspect they thought California was a lost cause. For me “conservative” meant growing up in a church that occasionally railed on about how gay marriage and divorce were another step towards the total dissolution of the family, how Muslims and the occult were vaguely dangerous, and something about why “wars and rumors of war” meant famine was coming with Christ not far behind. It meant being pro-Bush and anti-Obama. It meant background noise of conservative radio that was mostly mild but had some standout moments. It meant being surrounded by rhetoric and talking points I’ve mostly forgotten but that make me cringe when I remember them.
My dad was raised by a single mother, a divorced alcoholic who’d likely suffered unknown childhood abuse and untreated mental illness. My mom was a NorCal latchkey kid with one brother and (as best I can tell) everything she wanted. They don’t talk much about themselves or their origins. From what I’ve gathered, my mom was raised Presbyterian and my dad had a brief stint working at an LDS temple during his seeker phase. One set of grandparents was loaded and bought us the good gifts and liked golf and the Simpsons and all things holiday magic, the other grandparents lived in a hoarders nest with the porch rotting and the shutters falling off. Beyond that, who knows.
I remember bits from the background of world events: Columbine, the gay agenda, Monica Lewinksy, Clinton/Gore, butterfly ballots and a near stolen election, global warming, emissions taxes, an Ozone hole, 9/11 (never forget), Challenger disaster, SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Katrina (there were other hurricanes but we lived in California, it was distant news), abortion doctors were murdering babies, something about Halloween candy (not that we celebrated anyway so it was no concern of mine).
Things were bad out there, you see. I wasn't quite a teenage conspiracy theorist, but I did most of the reading it would have taken to get there. The government was taking over, violating rights right and left, nosy neighbors might call CPS on us, we had to keep the HSLDA on speed dial. At the public schools, kids couldn’t read, the parents were on drugs (the kids also might not be white, I’d later realize), they taught about evolution and abortion and sex, kids were forced to pray to Islam and Buddha (or so I was told), something something school shootings, the teachers union was making it impossible to fire bad teachers. The food workers union was running people off the road? One or two valid fears, I guess.
It was of the upmost importance that I become a great man of God. I was, of course, one of the redeemers, Generation Joshua, born to bring this country back to God Almighty. A good arrow in my parents quiver. So I and my brothers were home schooled. I learned logic and studied the Great Men of God of yore (Jefferson and the federalists among them), I studied the prophecies and the psalms, I looped my cursive, I knew that true love waits. We were going to take dominion over the earth, or at least over the US Government.
My education centered on the “Great Men of God” and the creation story. Hisstory. America was a divine gift to the world, the pilgrims and pioneers were the newly chosen people. That was history and science. The great books and Christian texts, C.S. Lewis and Martin Luther (and even Rushdoony), the Book of Virtues and the Constitution were literature. It was all history, the great divine tapestry.
I’ll never completely understand how my parents made it from the Zero Population Growth of my grandparents progressive Presbyterianism to the non-denominational Quiverfull-adjacent “family integrated church” of my youth. There was a Calvary Chapel involved at the beginning, of course, which I suspect proved too liberal (or not fundy enough) before long. Somehow my mom’s best friend zigged into eco-new-age-Catholicism (Crystals, Gia, the Virgin Mary) while my mom zagged into what Focus on the Family and Vision Forum were selling. It feels a bit like rivers branching. We kept the More with Less cookbook and Mountain People’s Warehouse catalog though. Lentils with cumin or one of those lemon poppyseed hippy cookies will take me right back.
This is the valley I started in.
Eventually California was too much. Too expensive, too liberal — there was no way three men of God* would be able to make a good start there. It was time to leave the city and build a homestead elsewhere. Whether divine inspiration or something else, my parents narrowed the options to Montana and Tennessee and picked the one with less snow (though as we’d find out later, less sky).
*\ this, of course refers to me and my two brothers at the time.**
This move led to what is likely the most formative experience in my life and, I think, started me on a path I’ve been following since. We sold nearly everything and said goodbye to our friends. We were going to live the van life before it was cool. All told, we spent about three months on the road. The trip taught me a lot about the US and myself and my family. It also managed to cut all ties to the friends I had, and when combined with the details of our Tennessee landing, put me on an exit path that would eventually lead me here, to the rim of the valley. I’m looking back at where I started and thinking about what it means to leave a place that, in retrospect, never quite felt like home.
I’m no longer in that valley, but there’s a lot more to say. In it sits an unfortunately relevant intersection of ideological rivers like Christian Libertarianism, “Christian Conservatism,” Dominionism, back to the land homesteading, techno-optimism, today’s prison industrial complex, modern financialization even. The Christian Right and neoliberalism have sources all over, but so many of these currents passed through the valley I grew up in.
I want to share a bit of how I climbed out and found myself in the ideological position I’m in today. I want to share more of what my current position is and how my trek got me here. But most importantly, I want to share what I see when I look at the things happening today and how they connect to what I saw and learned in that valley.
Seeds, currents, and orbits (?)
☄️ American Hysteria, The End of the World
👀 a small hint at what I'll probably be writing about next
I promise these tangents eventually fold into a coherent theme or two
the Christian RightCast end-times deep dive series: Apocalypse Then and Now, The End Times Industrial Complex, and The Late Great Planet Earth